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In a different game system, My character dropped to 0. Woke up captured in a cell. I had to escape a prison by myself. I learned how to think on my feet, and got much better as a player. I also learned how to escape in the context of what my character was. That turned a defeat into a victory for me...
I'm actually really thankful that I don't run into this problem in my game. Session 2, my party of three lvl 2 characters encountered a young black dragon just out exploring the world and was curious about them because one was a dragonborn so he smelled different than normal humanoids. They just talked to him and it was fun. Than they have run away from dungeons multiple times, one they have run from twice. Because they don't feel it safe to rest in a dungeon.
I was so proud of my GF in the last game i ran. the Pond that had been marked on the pirate map her party found led them to a pond surrounded by skeeletons overgrown in vines. the pond was filled with hundreds of coins and gems. She reached in and it ended up burning her hand. the pond ended up having a massive clear ooze in it and it used thewatering hole as a feeding ground. pirates ended up using it for treasure. as soon as the "water" in the pond began rising up and reaching towards them.....She said i turn and run into the jungle, her party followed.
I had a similar problem in a campaign, I had an Arch-mage Lich who was the master librarian of the repository of magical books for the national magical college. The warlock of the party saw this Lich and all his magical books and immediately thought to attack him. The Lich was supposed to be one of the main npc characters in this campaign and a huge part of this story. The Lich in his life had been one of the founders of the college and begun the collection of magical relics and text. As such this library contained dozens of various stat boosting books from manuals of quickness and dexterity to tomes of insight ect. My point in sharing this info with the party was to illustrate that this guy would be a major quest giver/plot point. The Warlock hears this and decides that attacking this lich is good idea. What followed was the fastest party stomp I've ever orchestrated. To be fair, I didn't kill them, I did however knock out the whole party and teleport them away. The warlock however refused to give up on the notion of fighting this guy and promptly found himself barred from the library and also the city it was located in. He did eventually try to smooth things over, thinking well if he just got library access again he could just read his way to power, a plan which was ruined when he found out that while the library did contain tons of these books, almost none of them had recharged the magical power required to apply the stat boosting effect. Of the few that had recharged there was a waiting list, Strictly managed by the Arch-Lich. He was pissed. I had to explain to him that this is a college library, there are students of magic regularly in here reading these text to uncover the secrets of the arcane. For a character with 17 intelligence, he had remarkably little logical reasoning skills.
Well, being smart is one thing, being wise and having common sense another. Einstein himself famously resisted the idea of quantum physics, i.e. the foundation of modern computing. You are literally on a machine that the 'icon of smurts' denied could exist. Big Int, low Wis makes for slow uptake. If, however, players truly force it, make a fake roll, say they rolled high and tell them their subconscious is sick of getting hurt without any gain (self preservation nagging usually gets my players to take a hint).
Sapphire Crook - The bit about 17 int is as much a shot at him as it was his character. The player is irl a philosophy major and annoying rules lawyer. He has not been invited back to the D&D table.
To be fair a Lich, arch-mage or not, is an evil dead mage with a thnig for Necromancy. So you kind of put a sign saying "this place is evil and he is part of the reason why"
Jul zi - In most cases you'd be right, but not here. This particular lich was not evil or even particularly interested in necromancy. He had become a lich to continue his greater magical research uninterrupted. To him becoming undead had been a matter of practicality. Not only that but the big bad for the campaign had already been introduced and he had nothing to do with this Lich. The big bad btw was a gnomish tinkerer creating giant brass golems capable of aborbing magic and using the stored spells.
I'm dealing with this right now. In one session, the party leader decided he just didn't care anymore, or maybe he thought it was funny, but he angered all npc allies, and jumped the party into a portal with no idea where it went. I emailed the whole party to let them know in very certain terms, they had no info, no allies, no one who can do resurrections. They did not know where they were geographically, or planar-wise. I asked if anyone had played Call of Cthulu and would that be still fun. They all agreed it would be fun. I think I failed to convey the danger they are in, but some players don't believe anything is dangerous until an arm gets ripped off. TPK incoming. Dealing with doubt has to what I could have done to keep them on track, and do I want to keep the campaign going.
Something that might be fun would be to do a one-off session with new characters where the goal is to go in and rescue their old characters. Maybe the one-off characters are high enough level to straight up defeat the minotaur king (and take the axe for themselves so the old characters don't get it), maybe it's more of a stealth mission to rescue mistreated humanoids rumoured to be held by the king. Either way, it allows for a brief interlude to try different characters, an explanation for how the characters got away without it being a deus ex machina, and an opportunity to "get back" at the minotaur that TPK'ed the group.
Here is some stuff to keep in mind as a gm with a living world. You have to make the players understand when something is outside of the players level. I remember a time when we were walking in the woods, and found some corpses in armor that, we continued on to get attacked and killed. apparently the corpses were intended to be our warning. That being said we had no actual way to know what killed them, if what killed them would still be a threat or in what direction the threat would actual be in. It would be different if it was at a cave mouth then we could guess that the threat is in the cave, but instead we had to guess about it being somewhere in the woods. In most campaigns corpses are almost just decoration rather than a warning sign. It was made even worse by the fact that we were not attacked immediately but instead ambushed at night when we were not wearing armor.
I dm a living breathing world but I make damn sure my players know what they are getting into. I use random encounters sometimes once I rolled the Orc Warchief himself would lead a raid on a caravan the one they were guarding. I had them meet and befriend a bad ass barbarian, like this guy was five levels higher then the party and I made damn sure they knew this guy was stronger then them. He gets wrecked by the Warchief and they were like OH SHIT! And my players are usually smart enough to know when the enemy lets you try to swing at him first to just run.
I am remembering when my players didn't get the idea not to mess with a dude the first time they met, and ended up messing with him a second time. Basically the game was based around final fantasy tactics advanced. they ended up meeting a dude who sells law and anti-law cards that he makes. These card can essentially send someone straight to jail. So the players talk to him individually on multiple occasions but they really are only somewhat acquainted at best. Eventually one of the players decided to scream at him in a foreign language. He mistook him for attempting to cast a spell on him, and sent him to jail. After paying their fine several sessions went by and eventually they wandered into the guys house. The dude comes home while they are in his house. He more or less allows the players to go after figuring out that they stole some of his stuff and he took the stuff back. So the players decide right after leaving to light the guy's house on fire. So they end up in jail as the guy's house was described as moldy and decrepit so it was no where near a lethal fire.
I found my sympathy for the party evaporating around the "no real investigation or research" bit. I mean, if it were a Modern campaign and the players were intending a bank heist, they'd instantly understand that more thought was required than just finding the bank. My sympathy evaporated completely with the complaint that the adversary they intended to fight for possession of an item _shouldn't have been able to use the item._ The whole point of having a magic item is so that you can use it. I'm pretty sure the players intended to use the item once they acquired it: that's why they were trying to acquire it.
Only got a big TPK like that once during a campaign. We were a bit unprepared, most of us were really new to the setting (it was a D20 Wheel of Time game) and we were trying to have characters a lot more RP intensive and less efficient, which can be fine, until we found ourselves facing a large camp of bandits and failed many, many attack rolls, getting overwhelmed. The DM moved the story along, making up reroll new characters who came to the same region, arriving a few days later (since it was following the events of the books, he couldn't make too much time pass) Our new characters were a little more prepared, able to get more information on the bandits and the villagers who'd been captured by the bandits told us of the people who tried to heroically save them but fell under the bandits' blades.
Hey guys! Update to this particular story. So I sat down with my group and asked them if they wanted to continue the story with these people or begin another epic venture. The responds was excellent, they liked their characters, one claiming it was his favorite so far, and wanted to continue what they started. short version: So they stayed in the Dungeon world, learning about the lore and life style of the realm, about the six gates that lead to different very specialized areas, about the horrors of when someone who is two weak to planar travel (Insert Galaxyquest transporter fail), even watching other hero's come and be quashed by the King. Months turn to years... a decade, until the fourteenth year Three champions enter. The cleric recognizes them instantly and with a cocky smirk looks to the lizardkin (a new player who was born in the labyrinth), "Fifteen seconds... maybe less" And accurate to the word the combat ends almost as quickly as its started. The King, who's in complete shock, ends the session with a baffled "Oh... sh-t."
I had an opposite issue. One of my players expressed dissatisfaction at how easy my encounters were, and suggested that I should make them run away from something. Long story short, Rocs fall, everyone dies.
After years of playing with groups who kept character death as a rare thing, I wasn't prepared to almost have my bard die 10 minutes into the first game with my current group
Alexandra Elizabeth Dying 10 minutes in is much better than 10 levels in. Trust me. Low level character deaths are a lot easier to get used to than the character you’ve been playing for over a year. THAT kind of character death is rough, because you start to miss the character after a while because they grew on you.
Oh, I know ^.^ I'm the kind of player who totally breaks down crying when my long term characters die But, my usually gaming groups tend to have character death be a very rare thing and with the group I currently play D&D with, we've had about 30 character deaths since the game started and that was a serious, unexpected, change for me to adapt to (Fortunately my current character is CN and thus the second longest lived character as she'll bail on the party if she needs to)
I'm doing a sandbox game but I put story limits on it in a sense. You can go everywhere but you wouldn't want to go further or you wouldn't know about the extra thing until maybe the second time being there. That makes it so they can go there and do stuff without the "oops you stepped on the wrong square of the grid and a dragon kills you at level 3." Like I have a set of mines but certain parts become more accessible depending how much you know about the mines. As well as certain events happening depending on what happens in the story at certain times so that harder things come out when triggered by certain quests as well as keeping track of days and planning out a calendar or things that happen depending how far into the campaign it is.
I'm a firm believer in the players respecting the world and there being consequences, both good and bad. If the players treat it like a video game and assume they will handle everything thrown at them, that's belittling the world their characters in, and their characters would be stupid to think that way and would be treated as stupid by npcs
Geoffrey Perrin yes however there is a problem with this. My players love to try and murder things. They found a way to push this I think it was an orc warlord decked out with a artifact that they had learned about and knew was incredibly powerful. They were level 3. Thus was an orc fighter level 10 with magic armor and a broken artifact. They waited for the perfect time and pushed him of a cliff. He lived and tpked them. They were so mad. But they learned a valuable lesson. Dont try to fight things that are way to powerful for you.
Shadowgear I'm not saying the whole thing couldn't have been handled better on the DM's side (like having villagers talk loudly about how a party about the party's level went in there and died), but players need to learn lessons like this at some point, it just so happened you were their DM when they learned it
With the right planning, anything is possible ^.^ Seduce the Orc, get the artifact and/or armor away from him, have the band of mercenaries you hired wittle him down, fire the arbalests, release the war hounds, and if that doesn't work, pepper the Orc with ranged attacks and magic while keeping out of his melee range
I was wondering if y’all had any ideas for semi dependent characters. For example, a Samurai who has a another character playing a Lingering Soul that’s attached to the Samurai’s sword
We had an encounter in our game our dm is running and this was like 6 seasons ago. My Dragon Born fighter jumped in-between the party and some npc's to take a hit for them because he saw it as his task to protect them even though they are no slouches themselves. Short answer he was under the effects of a potion of growth that lead to a cool encounter and allowed him to stay standing in the presence of an evil God, and shield everyone but it killed him. I explained my reasoning, I told the DM his personality would make him do it, that as a solider he protects others and dose what he believes is right I made the roll to succeed and make it in time (nat 20) required. I died but everyone else lived. He got blasted with magic, was killed instantly and is currently trapped in the afterlife being tortured by this God's minions as they try to corrupt him and break his will for their purposes. The party has gone through trials that involved frozen wastelands and bitter conditions to climbing the tallest mountain in this game world to encounter a powerful dragon, fight him to a stalemate and survive do to some divine intervention and gain passage to the afterlife so they could retrieve the dragon born's soul and return to the living world. It's been a lot of fun and currently they are in the dungeon trying to reach me before I break under torture.
got a cleric? divine intervention. one time teleportation and resurrection by your clerics deity but force into a party geas (difficult but forced lvl appropriate) god stresses one time mulligan. the great item the quest for has to be donated to church.
Invent a reason that everything is ok because it just is. The term comes from Greek theatre where, at the end of the story, a representation of a god/goddess would be lowered on a set of pulleys to fix everything and bring the story to its conclusion, thus a deus ex machina (god from the machine).
Deus Ex Machina, like when a party is written into a corner with no means of escape and an outside force (A god, a high level wizard, a wise-cracking dragon) comes in to rescue the party from game over
It depends on the players, characters or story. Shit happens, but did the DM lead them to believe that the enemy was too strong? If so then ya talk to the players pitch them some options, either reroll and tie it back to the dead party. Or try an entirely new time and place? Or add some lore to life after death or some other worldly influence giving them a new life or challenge for renewed life.
When starting with a new player, I like to run them through a "sample" dungeon, 5 rooms, and 3 skeletons hidden somewhere inside. If they are a Rogue, Monk, or Bard, there will be a trap. If they are a Fighter, Barbarian, Ranger, or tough Cleric, the skeletons will have max HP. If they are a healing Cleric, Druid, Sorcerer, or Wizard, there will be 4 healing potions in one of the rooms. A Warlock will have to find an object that is needed by his Patron and bring it out safely. This is for first level PCs, and if they die, they "re-spawn" at the entrance and try again. The monsters are mixed up and put into different rooms, so it's random. One Fighter died three times, because even though his actions were tactically sound, he rolled the worst attacks ever. The PCs get to keep anything they find, and the XP for skeletons killed, and go on the main adventure. The reason I write all this is because the DM had a CR 18 adventure planned, and scaled it down. Did the players have previous experience, or did they just start at 18th Level? Have PC deaths and "do-overs" been explained before? If the DM chooses to restart the campaign with PCs alive and intact, then the layout of the adventure should change, so that player knowledge doesn't give them an unfair advantage.
You could have a high level group of npc's find them and rez them, but they don't do it for free (1,000 gold per char rezzed or something like that). So now the PC's are deeply in dept and now have to work for the high level group.
Don't save the players from themselves. Player do something blatantly stupid = let the dice rolls stand. The DM screen is there for the purpose of letting the DM fudge rolls for the benefit of the storyline, but not to have the DM save the PCs from their own stupid choices. ******* DM caused deaths due to setting up a virtually guaranteed TPK scenario and forcing them in... that is on the DM and the DM needs to fix it. Some high power mage pops up and selective group teleports the party out, says something similar to: "I am not able to deal with that... yet. You certainly aren't either." If it takes a deity to get them out... do it. Stick in a Tom Bombadil. (essentially the halflings getting caught by the sentient tree and nearly dying was the DM set them up for sure death and he sent in someone to save them.)
Do a one shot campaign of a high lvl adventuring party (run by the same players) that has been hired to save these fool amature adventurers who wandered into the minotaurs maze. If they succeed, the players get to feel like they redeemed themselves AND get to keep playing their original characters if they feel invested in them.
Iunno, I can't think of a level range where their arguments (A minotaur shouldn't have been allowed to use the weapon they knew it possessed? Really?) become more valid, the only extra bit of information useful would be how much foreshadowing he gave them, which is in itself pretty level agnostic.
If I'm on a quest to kill the king, I might sit down and form a plan of some sort, or research the defences or something. Just saying The modern day equivalent would be trying to kill the president by just charging the Whitehouse with weapons. It's just not going to succeed.
There has to be risk in the game. So, a complete wipe should lead to death, or a prison sentence, and/or a loss of stuff or reputation. Maybe the characters get a year as the minotaur's slaves before they escape. But as all heroes do, the time will come when they get their revenge, and it will be sweet. Epic story ahead!
Allow those who wish to have their characters still to be prisoners. And the others can make a new character who is in the Minotaur's layer for whatever reason (prisoner/slave/etc...)
the players should suffer the consequence or else they will always tempt the dm by steamrolling difficult challenges due to the players meta-gaming and knowing the dm won't kill them. which means removing a part of D&D.
I've never had a TPK that was from mistakes, they are usually from really crappy roles on the players part and good roles on the GM's part. So just REALLY bad luck!!
Classic scenario, Player vs DM terrible situation to be in. It sorta depends how thorough these players have always been, if the DM notices this he has a responsibility to make it at least more obvious. But if they knew at least something about it ie using Legend lore and still did it, they are at fault
It kinda depends on the encounter. Was this supposed to be a big climax or did they wander too deep into the wilds & got chomped by a dinosaur? That info beyond "they wandered into a part of the world that was too rough for them," didn't exactly seem to be in the question. If it was just a random encounter than maybe "it was all just a dream & you never went to this DANGEROUS part of the world," works better. If it was a Big Bad who was gathering their forces to Take Over The WORLD (Muahaha!!!,) then maybe a campaign reset under his Empire is the next step.
yea sounds like one of those things you should talk to the party about. i will add another option though, instead of skipping forward x amount of years just remember that it is a living world and new heroes are being "created" every day. nothing wrong with making new characters on the opposite side of the country, maybe they make their way back there in the future and kill whatever killed the original party, maybe they don't and that becomes something that changes only a section of the world. heard minotaur thrown around a lot and can't really picture one being a threat to anything other than a small village, so maybe they come back and find the village destroyed and all of it's inhabitants dead.
If the players fuck up, they fuck up. Skip the story ahead 20-ish years, assuming their new characters would be children in the current timeline, and pick up there. Anything else is just a cop out and ruins the sense of danger and potential to lose my character. The only other solution I can see is, if the PCs had a benefactor who was invested in their quest, they might be brought back via a series of resurrection spells.
Should you dues ex machina this away. Probably not. If the players want to continue then toss the characters in prison for a bit. Let them escape or otherwise earn their freedom. This should be a learning moment though not just for the players. It’s hard to say for certain without knowing the road that led there but if your party is tpking like this often then perhaps the issue is how you are communicating the world to them. Things that are obvious to you and the living breathing people in your world are not guarenteed to be obvious to your players even if their characters should know better.
I honestly don't think the DM in this case did much wrong. I can't say how much he stressed that they probably shouldn't go after this particular person. But none of the complaints of the players are really all that valid. If the dangers were stressed in some ways then it is not always the DM's job to tone things down when players demand to push in a particular direction without putting the proper work in when they are warned it can happen. There are plenty of situations that Players as much as the characters need to learn to prepare for before tackling. Even if they are the heroes because the nature of D&D and the worlds they are in there are often a half dozen or more stories of failed heroes to every hero that triumphed and some of those failed heroes might even be more remembered than the ones that succeeded in some cases. If the party pushes to be the former. Sometimes you can work with them and make something new but occasionally they really should just become one of those former failed hero parties. more than anything players should not in any way expect the enemy not to be wielding the powerful magical item or artifact, particularly weapon or armour artifacts, unless these items are destroy or rewrite the world level items that should take special and dangerous activation. Just like the Heroes. These villains or NPC's may have worked hard on their own to obtain such items for their own use. Not just to plop in a hoard somewhere and let it collect dust. And plenty of the items you do find secreted away in some nook or something. Take some time and think. Your standing at a place where another hero has failed in his own journey. So maybe that can give you a lot more thought and respect for your loot than simply wanting bigger and better and badder magical items and thinking you should get them just because you rushed over to grab them.
Any of the players whose characters died that don’t want to roll up new characters can find another game. End of story. Anyone who thinks they should win every time shouldn’t play D&D. That’s my two cents.
Totally agree. I have had players before that think they are entitled to a middle earth danger. These days if I have someone at my table that is new to me. I give them the this is westeros not middle earth speech. It's not my job kill players but its not my job to treat them like children.
The encounter needed a better buildup, even if the party would run away. The road to the dungeon needed to have super difficult encounters engineered to foreshadow the dungeon's actual difficulty. If the party didn't turn away then, they were warned... or so to speak. This seems to be a fault of the GM not putting in the right context to warn the players of impending death. The players deserve to be retconned back to the beginning of the dungeon at least.
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In a different game system, My character dropped to 0. Woke up captured in a cell. I had to escape a prison by myself. I learned how to think on my feet, and got much better as a player. I also learned how to escape in the context of what my character was. That turned a defeat into a victory for me...
This is great advice!!
I'm actually really thankful that I don't run into this problem in my game. Session 2, my party of three lvl 2 characters encountered a young black dragon just out exploring the world and was curious about them because one was a dragonborn so he smelled different than normal humanoids. They just talked to him and it was fun.
Than they have run away from dungeons multiple times, one they have run from twice. Because they don't feel it safe to rest in a dungeon.
I was so proud of my GF in the last game i ran. the Pond that had been marked on the pirate map her party found led them to a pond surrounded by skeeletons overgrown in vines. the pond was filled with hundreds of coins and gems. She reached in and it ended up burning her hand. the pond ended up having a massive clear ooze in it and it used thewatering hole as a feeding ground. pirates ended up using it for treasure. as soon as the "water" in the pond began rising up and reaching towards them.....She said i turn and run into the jungle, her party followed.
I had a similar problem in a campaign, I had an Arch-mage Lich who was the master librarian of the repository of magical books for the national magical college. The warlock of the party saw this Lich and all his magical books and immediately thought to attack him. The Lich was supposed to be one of the main npc characters in this campaign and a huge part of this story. The Lich in his life had been one of the founders of the college and begun the collection of magical relics and text. As such this library contained dozens of various stat boosting books from manuals of quickness and dexterity to tomes of insight ect. My point in sharing this info with the party was to illustrate that this guy would be a major quest giver/plot point. The Warlock hears this and decides that attacking this lich is good idea. What followed was the fastest party stomp I've ever orchestrated. To be fair, I didn't kill them, I did however knock out the whole party and teleport them away. The warlock however refused to give up on the notion of fighting this guy and promptly found himself barred from the library and also the city it was located in. He did eventually try to smooth things over, thinking well if he just got library access again he could just read his way to power, a plan which was ruined when he found out that while the library did contain tons of these books, almost none of them had recharged the magical power required to apply the stat boosting effect. Of the few that had recharged there was a waiting list, Strictly managed by the Arch-Lich. He was pissed. I had to explain to him that this is a college library, there are students of magic regularly in here reading these text to uncover the secrets of the arcane. For a character with 17 intelligence, he had remarkably little logical reasoning skills.
Well, being smart is one thing, being wise and having common sense another.
Einstein himself famously resisted the idea of quantum physics, i.e. the foundation of modern computing.
You are literally on a machine that the 'icon of smurts' denied could exist.
Big Int, low Wis makes for slow uptake.
If, however, players truly force it, make a fake roll, say they rolled high and tell them their subconscious is sick of getting hurt without any gain (self preservation nagging usually gets my players to take a hint).
Sapphire Crook - The bit about 17 int is as much a shot at him as it was his character. The player is irl a philosophy major and annoying rules lawyer. He has not been invited back to the D&D table.
You'd think a Philosophy Major of all majors would get you to think a little harder.
Good riddance.
To be fair a Lich, arch-mage or not, is an evil dead mage with a thnig for Necromancy. So you kind of put a sign saying "this place is evil and he is part of the reason why"
Jul zi - In most cases you'd be right, but not here. This particular lich was not evil or even particularly interested in necromancy. He had become a lich to continue his greater magical research uninterrupted. To him becoming undead had been a matter of practicality. Not only that but the big bad for the campaign had already been introduced and he had nothing to do with this Lich. The big bad btw was a gnomish tinkerer creating giant brass golems capable of aborbing magic and using the stored spells.
I'm dealing with this right now. In one session, the party leader decided he just didn't care anymore, or maybe he thought it was funny, but he angered all npc allies, and jumped the party into a portal with no idea where it went.
I emailed the whole party to let them know in very certain terms, they had no info, no allies, no one who can do resurrections. They did not know where they were geographically, or planar-wise. I asked if anyone had played Call of Cthulu and would that be still fun.
They all agreed it would be fun.
I think I failed to convey the danger they are in, but some players don't believe anything is dangerous until an arm gets ripped off. TPK incoming. Dealing with doubt has to what I could have done to keep them on track, and do I want to keep the campaign going.
Something that might be fun would be to do a one-off session with new characters where the goal is to go in and rescue their old characters. Maybe the one-off characters are high enough level to straight up defeat the minotaur king (and take the axe for themselves so the old characters don't get it), maybe it's more of a stealth mission to rescue mistreated humanoids rumoured to be held by the king. Either way, it allows for a brief interlude to try different characters, an explanation for how the characters got away without it being a deus ex machina, and an opportunity to "get back" at the minotaur that TPK'ed the group.
"Because some things are just tougher than you. That's how life works." - Life advice from Dave
There's always a bigger dragon.
- Bahamut
Here is some stuff to keep in mind as a gm with a living world. You have to make the players understand when something is outside of the players level. I remember a time when we were walking in the woods, and found some corpses in armor that, we continued on to get attacked and killed. apparently the corpses were intended to be our warning. That being said we had no actual way to know what killed them, if what killed them would still be a threat or in what direction the threat would actual be in. It would be different if it was at a cave mouth then we could guess that the threat is in the cave, but instead we had to guess about it being somewhere in the woods. In most campaigns corpses are almost just decoration rather than a warning sign. It was made even worse by the fact that we were not attacked immediately but instead ambushed at night when we were not wearing armor.
I dm a living breathing world but I make damn sure my players know what they are getting into. I use random encounters sometimes once I rolled the Orc Warchief himself would lead a raid on a caravan the one they were guarding. I had them meet and befriend a bad ass barbarian, like this guy was five levels higher then the party and I made damn sure they knew this guy was stronger then them. He gets wrecked by the Warchief and they were like OH SHIT! And my players are usually smart enough to know when the enemy lets you try to swing at him first to just run.
I am remembering when my players didn't get the idea not to mess with a dude the first time they met, and ended up messing with him a second time. Basically the game was based around final fantasy tactics advanced. they ended up meeting a dude who sells law and anti-law cards that he makes. These card can essentially send someone straight to jail. So the players talk to him individually on multiple occasions but they really are only somewhat acquainted at best. Eventually one of the players decided to scream at him in a foreign language. He mistook him for attempting to cast a spell on him, and sent him to jail. After paying their fine several sessions went by and eventually they wandered into the guys house. The dude comes home while they are in his house. He more or less allows the players to go after figuring out that they stole some of his stuff and he took the stuff back. So the players decide right after leaving to light the guy's house on fire. So they end up in jail as the guy's house was described as moldy and decrepit so it was no where near a lethal fire.
I found my sympathy for the party evaporating around the "no real investigation or research" bit. I mean, if it were a Modern campaign and the players were intending a bank heist, they'd instantly understand that more thought was required than just finding the bank.
My sympathy evaporated completely with the complaint that the adversary they intended to fight for possession of an item _shouldn't have been able to use the item._ The whole point of having a magic item is so that you can use it. I'm pretty sure the players intended to use the item once they acquired it: that's why they were trying to acquire it.
Only got a big TPK like that once during a campaign. We were a bit unprepared, most of us were really new to the setting (it was a D20 Wheel of Time game) and we were trying to have characters a lot more RP intensive and less efficient, which can be fine, until we found ourselves facing a large camp of bandits and failed many, many attack rolls, getting overwhelmed.
The DM moved the story along, making up reroll new characters who came to the same region, arriving a few days later (since it was following the events of the books, he couldn't make too much time pass) Our new characters were a little more prepared, able to get more information on the bandits and the villagers who'd been captured by the bandits told us of the people who tried to heroically save them but fell under the bandits' blades.
Hey guys! Update to this particular story. So I sat down with my group and asked them if they wanted to continue the story with these people or begin another epic venture. The responds was excellent, they liked their characters, one claiming it was his favorite so far, and wanted to continue what they started.
short version:
So they stayed in the Dungeon world, learning about the lore and life style of the realm, about the six gates that lead to different very specialized areas, about the horrors of when someone who is two weak to planar travel (Insert Galaxyquest transporter fail), even watching other hero's come and be quashed by the King. Months turn to years... a decade, until the fourteenth year Three champions enter. The cleric recognizes them instantly and with a cocky smirk looks to the lizardkin (a new player who was born in the labyrinth), "Fifteen seconds... maybe less" And accurate to the word the combat ends almost as quickly as its started. The King, who's in complete shock, ends the session with a baffled "Oh... sh-t."
I had an opposite issue. One of my players expressed dissatisfaction at how easy my encounters were, and suggested that I should make them run away from something.
Long story short, Rocs fall, everyone dies.
Why do you need many rocs falling. One roc is heavy enough on it own. Its a giant bird that giants ride for cry out loud.
After years of playing with groups who kept character death as a rare thing, I wasn't prepared to almost have my bard die 10 minutes into the first game with my current group
Alexandra Elizabeth Dying 10 minutes in is much better than 10 levels in. Trust me. Low level character deaths are a lot easier to get used to than the character you’ve been playing for over a year. THAT kind of character death is rough, because you start to miss the character after a while because they grew on you.
Oh, I know ^.^ I'm the kind of player who totally breaks down crying when my long term characters die
But, my usually gaming groups tend to have character death be a very rare thing and with the group I currently play D&D with, we've had about 30 character deaths since the game started and that was a serious, unexpected, change for me to adapt to (Fortunately my current character is CN and thus the second longest lived character as she'll bail on the party if she needs to)
I'm doing a sandbox game but I put story limits on it in a sense. You can go everywhere but you wouldn't want to go further or you wouldn't know about the extra thing until maybe the second time being there. That makes it so they can go there and do stuff without the "oops you stepped on the wrong square of the grid and a dragon kills you at level 3." Like I have a set of mines but certain parts become more accessible depending how much you know about the mines. As well as certain events happening depending on what happens in the story at certain times so that harder things come out when triggered by certain quests as well as keeping track of days and planning out a calendar or things that happen depending how far into the campaign it is.
I'm a firm believer in the players respecting the world and there being consequences, both good and bad. If the players treat it like a video game and assume they will handle everything thrown at them, that's belittling the world their characters in, and their characters would be stupid to think that way and would be treated as stupid by npcs
Geoffrey Perrin yes however there is a problem with this. My players love to try and murder things. They found a way to push this I think it was an orc warlord decked out with a artifact that they had learned about and knew was incredibly powerful. They were level 3. Thus was an orc fighter level 10 with magic armor and a broken artifact. They waited for the perfect time and pushed him of a cliff. He lived and tpked them. They were so mad. But they learned a valuable lesson. Dont try to fight things that are way to powerful for you.
Shadowgear I'm not saying the whole thing couldn't have been handled better on the DM's side (like having villagers talk loudly about how a party about the party's level went in there and died), but players need to learn lessons like this at some point, it just so happened you were their DM when they learned it
Geoffrey Perrin yes I'm agreeing with you and sharing an experience
Sorry, I didn't mean to sound elitist or condecending
With the right planning, anything is possible ^.^ Seduce the Orc, get the artifact and/or armor away from him, have the band of mercenaries you hired wittle him down, fire the arbalests, release the war hounds, and if that doesn't work, pepper the Orc with ranged attacks and magic while keeping out of his melee range
What happened to the rancor?
I was wondering if y’all had any ideas for semi dependent characters. For example, a Samurai who has a another character playing a Lingering Soul that’s attached to the Samurai’s sword
We had an encounter in our game our dm is running and this was like 6 seasons ago. My Dragon Born fighter jumped in-between the party and some npc's to take a hit for them because he saw it as his task to protect them even though they are no slouches themselves. Short answer he was under the effects of a potion of growth that lead to a cool encounter and allowed him to stay standing in the presence of an evil God, and shield everyone but it killed him.
I explained my reasoning, I told the DM his personality would make him do it, that as a solider he protects others and dose what he believes is right I made the roll to succeed and make it in time (nat 20) required. I died but everyone else lived. He got blasted with magic, was killed instantly and is currently trapped in the afterlife being tortured by this God's minions as they try to corrupt him and break his will for their purposes. The party has gone through trials that involved frozen wastelands and bitter conditions to climbing the tallest mountain in this game world to encounter a powerful dragon, fight him to a stalemate and survive do to some divine intervention and gain passage to the afterlife so they could retrieve the dragon born's soul and return to the living world. It's been a lot of fun and currently they are in the dungeon trying to reach me before I break under torture.
got a cleric? divine intervention. one time teleportation and resurrection by your clerics deity but force into a party geas (difficult but forced lvl appropriate) god stresses one time mulligan. the great item the quest for has to be donated to church.
well the kids thats why the heroes need kids =).
OMG! I need Ted's shirt!
"Deus Ex Machina them away" what is that suppose to mean?
Invent a reason that everything is ok because it just is. The term comes from Greek theatre where, at the end of the story, a representation of a god/goddess would be lowered on a set of pulleys to fix everything and bring the story to its conclusion, thus a deus ex machina (god from the machine).
Deus Ex Machina, like when a party is written into a corner with no means of escape and an outside force (A god, a high level wizard, a wise-cracking dragon) comes in to rescue the party from game over
It depends on the players, characters or story. Shit happens, but did the DM lead them to believe that the enemy was too strong? If so then ya talk to the players pitch them some options, either reroll and tie it back to the dead party. Or try an entirely new time and place? Or add some lore to life after death or some other worldly influence giving them a new life or challenge for renewed life.
When starting with a new player, I like to run them through a "sample" dungeon, 5 rooms, and 3 skeletons hidden somewhere inside. If they are a Rogue, Monk, or Bard, there will be a trap. If they are a Fighter, Barbarian, Ranger, or tough Cleric, the skeletons will have max HP. If they are a healing Cleric, Druid, Sorcerer, or Wizard, there will be 4 healing potions in one of the rooms. A Warlock will have to find an object that is needed by his Patron and bring it out safely. This is for first level PCs, and if they die, they "re-spawn" at the entrance and try again. The monsters are mixed up and put into different rooms, so it's random. One Fighter died three times, because even though his actions were tactically sound, he rolled the worst attacks ever. The PCs get to keep anything they find, and the XP for skeletons killed, and go on the main adventure. The reason I write all this is because the DM had a CR 18 adventure planned, and scaled it down. Did the players have previous experience, or did they just start at 18th Level? Have PC deaths and "do-overs" been explained before? If the DM chooses to restart the campaign with PCs alive and intact, then the layout of the adventure should change, so that player knowledge doesn't give them an unfair advantage.
Does 3 cr2 monsters make for a cr6 encounter?
You could have a high level group of npc's find them and rez them, but they don't do it for free (1,000 gold per char rezzed or something like that). So now the PC's are deeply in dept and now have to work for the high level group.
Don't save the players from themselves.
Player do something blatantly stupid = let the dice rolls stand.
The DM screen is there for the purpose of letting the DM fudge rolls for the benefit of the storyline, but not to have the DM save the PCs from their own stupid choices.
*******
DM caused deaths due to setting up a virtually guaranteed TPK scenario and forcing them in... that is on the DM and the DM needs to fix it. Some high power mage pops up and selective group teleports the party out, says something similar to: "I am not able to deal with that... yet. You certainly aren't either." If it takes a deity to get them out... do it. Stick in a Tom Bombadil. (essentially the halflings getting caught by the sentient tree and nearly dying was the DM set them up for sure death and he sent in someone to save them.)
Do a one shot campaign of a high lvl adventuring party (run by the same players) that has been hired to save these fool amature adventurers who wandered into the minotaurs maze. If they succeed, the players get to feel like they redeemed themselves AND get to keep playing their original characters if they feel invested in them.
What level were the PCs? It really seems like the DM left out a few details in order to make the players look bad.
Iunno, I can't think of a level range where their arguments (A minotaur shouldn't have been allowed to use the weapon they knew it possessed? Really?) become more valid, the only extra bit of information useful would be how much foreshadowing he gave them, which is in itself pretty level agnostic.
If I'm on a quest to kill the king, I might sit down and form a plan of some sort, or research the defences or something.
Just saying
The modern day equivalent would be trying to kill the president by just charging the Whitehouse with weapons.
It's just not going to succeed.
There has to be risk in the game. So, a complete wipe should lead to death, or a prison sentence, and/or a loss of stuff or reputation. Maybe the characters get a year as the minotaur's slaves before they escape. But as all heroes do, the time will come when they get their revenge, and it will be sweet. Epic story ahead!
Allow those who wish to have their characters still to be prisoners. And the others can make a new character who is in the Minotaur's layer for whatever reason (prisoner/slave/etc...)
as the saying goes: "TPK happens"
the players should suffer the consequence or else they will always tempt the dm by steamrolling difficult challenges due to the players meta-gaming and knowing the dm won't kill them.
which means removing a part of D&D.
My players never complain when they TPK, we usually just learn from the mistakes.
I've never had a TPK that was from mistakes, they are usually from really crappy roles on the players part and good roles on the GM's part. So just REALLY bad luck!!
Classic scenario, Player vs DM terrible situation to be in. It sorta depends how thorough these players have always been, if the DM notices this he has a responsibility to make it at least more obvious. But if they knew at least something about it ie using Legend lore and still did it, they are at fault
Ben Sama This situation is why I feel it’s better to play online rather than face to face games.
Great show! - Great Answers!
dungeon MASTER = MEANINGFUL experiences
Nerd lifes matter \oo/
T.Rust Monster
Hey, idea for a new D&Dized char. Yoda! Goblin monk? Squat stature feat? Lol
It kinda depends on the encounter. Was this supposed to be a big climax or did they wander too deep into the wilds & got chomped by a dinosaur? That info beyond "they wandered into a part of the world that was too rough for them," didn't exactly seem to be in the question. If it was just a random encounter than maybe "it was all just a dream & you never went to this DANGEROUS part of the world," works better. If it was a Big Bad who was gathering their forces to Take Over The WORLD (Muahaha!!!,) then maybe a campaign reset under his Empire is the next step.
Prison escape will probably fun
yea sounds like one of those things you should talk to the party about. i will add another option though, instead of skipping forward x amount of years just remember that it is a living world and new heroes are being "created" every day. nothing wrong with making new characters on the opposite side of the country, maybe they make their way back there in the future and kill whatever killed the original party, maybe they don't and that becomes something that changes only a section of the world. heard minotaur thrown around a lot and can't really picture one being a threat to anything other than a small village, so maybe they come back and find the village destroyed and all of it's inhabitants dead.
If the players fuck up, they fuck up. Skip the story ahead 20-ish years, assuming their new characters would be children in the current timeline, and pick up there. Anything else is just a cop out and ruins the sense of danger and potential to lose my character.
The only other solution I can see is, if the PCs had a benefactor who was invested in their quest, they might be brought back via a series of resurrection spells.
Should you dues ex machina this away. Probably not. If the players want to continue then toss the characters in prison for a bit. Let them escape or otherwise earn their freedom. This should be a learning moment though not just for the players. It’s hard to say for certain without knowing the road that led there but if your party is tpking like this often then perhaps the issue is how you are communicating the world to them. Things that are obvious to you and the living breathing people in your world are not guarenteed to be obvious to your players even if their characters should know better.
I honestly don't think the DM in this case did much wrong. I can't say how much he stressed that they probably shouldn't go after this particular person. But none of the complaints of the players are really all that valid. If the dangers were stressed in some ways then it is not always the DM's job to tone things down when players demand to push in a particular direction without putting the proper work in when they are warned it can happen. There are plenty of situations that Players as much as the characters need to learn to prepare for before tackling. Even if they are the heroes because the nature of D&D and the worlds they are in there are often a half dozen or more stories of failed heroes to every hero that triumphed and some of those failed heroes might even be more remembered than the ones that succeeded in some cases. If the party pushes to be the former. Sometimes you can work with them and make something new but occasionally they really should just become one of those former failed hero parties.
more than anything players should not in any way expect the enemy not to be wielding the powerful magical item or artifact, particularly weapon or armour artifacts, unless these items are destroy or rewrite the world level items that should take special and dangerous activation. Just like the Heroes. These villains or NPC's may have worked hard on their own to obtain such items for their own use. Not just to plop in a hoard somewhere and let it collect dust. And plenty of the items you do find secreted away in some nook or something. Take some time and think. Your standing at a place where another hero has failed in his own journey. So maybe that can give you a lot more thought and respect for your loot than simply wanting bigger and better and badder magical items and thinking you should get them just because you rushed over to grab them.
Any of the players whose characters died that don’t want to roll up new characters can find another game. End of story. Anyone who thinks they should win every time shouldn’t play D&D. That’s my two cents.
Totally agree. I have had players before that think they are entitled to a middle earth danger. These days if I have someone at my table that is new to me. I give them the this is westeros not middle earth speech. It's not my job kill players but its not my job to treat them like children.
Nazi Dragonborn...awesome idea.
Yes.
They were susceptible to being a bamboozled!
You spelt dun wrong!
The encounter needed a better buildup, even if the party would run away. The road to the dungeon needed to have super difficult encounters engineered to foreshadow the dungeon's actual difficulty. If the party didn't turn away then, they were warned... or so to speak. This seems to be a fault of the GM not putting in the right context to warn the players of impending death. The players deserve to be retconned back to the beginning of the dungeon at least.